


Consider, Instead, Being Afraid of Everything

by cridecoeur



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 02:06:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cridecoeur/pseuds/cridecoeur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil has skin roughly the color of sun parched earth and eyes that occasionally do not pulsate with the white blankness of nothingness. (There is, after all, always a chance of indigo.) His soothing voice melts away the static echo of dead air even, occasionally, when he is not directly speaking. Only think of Cecil, and you may hear his voice parting the night, just as one hand parts the sea, as we are all capable of doing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consider, Instead, Being Afraid of Everything

**Author's Note:**

> Cecil Baldwin is ruining my life.
> 
> a.k.a. I thought I was done with fandom for good and then I listened to Welcome to Night Vale (by which I mean I devoured all 28 episodes in three days during which i also worked 21 hours) and then immediately wrote this which is basically just a ridiculous love letter to Cecil told mostly through metaphors, I've never claimed to be a subtle man, and I love Cecil more than I love most actual people (it is a sickness), so I kind of had to get this out of the way first, just so I could write less ridiculous things after.

Out on the sun baked scrublands surrounding Night Vale are 150 acres pregnant with the idea of peaches, if not so much the literal reality of them—John Peters (you know, the farmer) has wished so long for a successful crop of them that even the local Green Market has set up empty stalls waiting for a crop that will never come. The literal existence of the peaches has never been as important as the metaphorical idea of them—sometimes ideas mean more in Night Vale than their reality.

Cecil seems much like that, only he is not a metaphorical peach but an actual person, the idea of which Night Vale has long rallied around.

(Or, at least, he is _usually_ an actual person.)

#

Cecil has skin roughly the color of sun parched earth and eyes that occasionally do not pulsate with the white blankness of nothingness. (There is, after all, always a chance of indigo.) His soothing voice melts away the static echo of dead air even, occasionally, when he is not directly speaking. Only think of Cecil, and you may hear his voice parting the night, just as one hand parts the sea, as we are all capable of doing.

Carlos first heard Cecil’s voice while the highway unspooled in front of him and Night Vale was a smudge of dust against the earth, in the distance. The sky was the color of coal dust, and Cecil’s voice was soothing, melodic, had a nearly hypnotic quality. He could not quite imagine what sort of man would be attached to that voice.

He still cannot entirely imagine him, but at least he is not alone in that. Cecil is usually shaped like a human being, but this means nothing in Night Vale, where the distinct details of a thing are not always so distinct but are always so very important.

Carlos changed the station, but Cecil was speaking there, too, across the radio waves. As far as Carlos could tell, he was speaking on every station.

#

Cecil has ink that winds across his skin like rivers that cut, strangely, improbably, through the heart of a desert, washing color and life across some sun baked plane. Carlos takes one of Cecil’s hands in his own and touches the stark lines that cross his forearm, just testing, just to see.

“Oh,” Cecil says, in a high, quavering voice that resembles the voice on the radio not at all. The air around them becomes even hotter and stickier than it was before. The lines of ink shift and quiver, like a nest of writhing snakes, only to reform into the smooth, soft folds of a hundred tiny flowers, blossoms open to the unrelenting desert sun.

“That’s highly improbable,” Carlos says.

“Uh huh,” Cecil says, and behind him the sky shifts from a threatening confrontation with the void to vibrantly pink and red, like a particularly stunning sunset.

As a good scientist (and, also, as an unusually human man), Carlos finds this fascinating.

#

Cecil speaks long of things that no one else is allowed to speak of, at all, and has yet survived to whatever age he might be (which Carlos finds quite impossible to determine but as a number, he thinks, might be frighteningly high and is, perhaps not even known to Cecil who, when directly questioned, cannot even say how long he was in Europe, let alone how long he has resided in Night Vale). Carlos can find no rational explanation for this, but he feels it must have something to do with how Cecil speaks so intimately and earnestly to Night Vale, telling the radio waves feelings Carlos would keep safely hidden—no one is closer to Night Vale than Cecil, and no one is closer to Cecil than Night Vale.

#

Cecil had a mother, in the sense that all living beings must have a mother simply to prevent too many direct questions being asked about the nature of their own existence. He will speak of things she had said to him, memories he has of her. But when he last saw or spoke to her is a mystery to everyone involved.

#

One night, Carlos hears Cecil say, over the radio waves, “Remember, dear listeners, that there is nothing present at night that is not also present during the day. It is only harder for those of us not gifted with night vision to see. So if you are afraid of the dark, consider, instead being afraid of everything.”

The advice seems insincere coming from Cecil who Carlos knows of being truly afraid far less frequently than is advisable and most significantly when Carlos, himself, had foolishly charged into the underground city of tiny but apparently warmongering citizens to nearly die. Carlos’ impressions of that fear birthed across radio waves is only hazy since he was mostly occupied with bleeding on the floor of the pin retrieval area of Lane 5, but they are the most distinct taste of Cecil’s fears he has ever known.

(When Cecil speaks of him, like a prayer lifted to the Night Vale sky, Carlos’ heart beats frantic against his ribs, like a caged bird trying to beat its wings to freedom.)

#

When Carlos looks up at the lights above the Arby’s, with Cecil’s head resting on his shoulder and his hand resting on Cecil’s thigh, he feels substantial in a way that Cecil doesn’t, precisely. Cecil vibrates beneath his hand like the plucked string of a violin slowly trembling itself into silence. Carlos wonders, briefly, what Night Vale would be without Cecil’s voice smooth and hypnotic on the radio, but he has a feeling he will never find out, that maybe no one ever will.

Cecil once said that he was working hard for his own death. Carlos thinks he is also working futilely.

#

Cecil’s mouth tastes like air does after a lightening strike—coppery and hot. When Carlos kisses him, he feels as if his blood burns much warmer in his body than it should. Since this is, after all, Night Vale, he is probably correct. When he gets a handful of Cecil’s dark hair, it feels fine and soft between his fingers and mostly like human hair should. 

This is more reassuring than it probably should be. Carlos has seen a house in Night Vale that empirically does not exist. The texture of Cecil’s hair is really neither here nor there, except that Carlos enjoys touching it, as he is coming to enjoy most things about Cecil, which he feels is an empirically significant fact.

#

Cecil’s body arches like the very desert stretching towards the horizon, but his skin is soft and smooth—not hard or dry or in any way unpleasant to the senses when Carlos runs his hands over it. He is, Carlos finds, a constantly changing canvas of ink that shifts and reforms at each press of Carlos’ fingers, like he is somehow remaking Cecil. Carlos would not call him _perfect in every way_ because he is not given to Cecil’s propensity for hyperbole, but he is strangely and undeniably beautiful. 

He looks down at Cecil, presses his thumbs against his hipbones where stark ink is reforming into desert blossoms, and says, “You’re very improbable.”

Cecil smiles at him, widely, revealing teeth that are, for the most part, human, and says, “You say the sweetest things.”

**Author's Note:**

> ~Shameless self promotion time~ feel free to ignore everything after this. I now have a [Tumblr](http://smugbitchesinc.tumblr.com/), the username of which is funnier than I will ever succeed in being, and you should definitely come and say hi even though the only thing I ever do these days is reblog Welcome to Night Vale art and yell about the show. But conceivably I will be posting things there that are not significant enough to post here, so. There's that. 
> 
> Also [my book](http://www.lessthanthreepress.com/books/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=90&products_id=491) is gonna go up for pre sale within the next few days and if you have read my comedy stuff before and like it well this is a ridiculous gay rom com about superheroes and grad students and the people who make their lives difficult, idk, maybe you'll like it, and then I won't go down in infamy as the worst and least successful gay romance writer of all time.


End file.
